October Blog
Our second month in China started with a week long holiday. This holiday is held every year during the first week of October. This week is called ‘Golden Week’, during which many Chinese people travel around China. The first day of this holiday is called ‘Chinese National Day’, which is held to commemorate the founding of People’s Republic of China. This holiday does come with a catch for the university students. We had to go to extra classes on the weekends to make up for the missed week, which is fair enough as we had only been at Uni for 2 weeks before getting a holiday!
For the holiday, seven of the Scottish scholars decide to visit Qufu, the hometown of Confucius. Confucius was a Chinese philosopher and politician who lived from 551 – 479BC. Confucius and his teachings had a considerable influence in shaping human history and these teachings are still relevant in Chinese culture today. This is of great interest to me so the opportunity to visit his birthplace was not to be missed.
Our journey to Qufu (曲阜) started early with us catching a high-speed train from Tianjin 天津 to Beijing 北京. This train journey was on the famous ‘bullet’ train took just 30 minutes to cover over 80 miles. The whole journey was very comfortable and pleasant. We were completely unaware of how fast we were actually travelling at! Scotrail could learn a thing or two! As our next train wasn’t till 11pm that night, we had a whole day in the capital of China. As this national holiday is one of the biggest events of the year, it was fair to say it was completely packed with people. We needed a plan of action; we used the same Alipay bikes I spoke about in my previous blog and cycled to the world-famous Pearl Market. Inside the market was overwhelming! Each stall had someone come up trying to coax us in with a ‘Gucci’ bag or belt. I did succumb and purchased an ‘Off-white’ belt. I was very happy with the cost. From there, we made our way to Tiananmen Square. The security had all the roads around the area blocked off to traffic. So, we had to park up the bikes and join the crowd and walk the rest of the way to Tiananmen Square. Once through security, we were in the world famous square. I don’t think I’ve seen this vast amount of people in the same place at one time. We had to push our way through the sea of people trying to get as close to the portrait of Chairman Mao as we could.
Later that day, although we were shattered, we boarded a normal speed train for an 8-hour overnight journey to Qufu. We got into the rural town in the morning and settled into our Airbnb then went on to explore the town. It was a nice change from towering skyscrapers and hustling traffic even though it was still quite busy with tourists. The presence of tourism didn’t fade away the next day on our hike up Mt Tai Shan 泰山. There was a wide stone staircase the whole way up the 1,533m tall mountain (that’s just a bit taller than Ben Nevis), with markets and temples every few steps and an endless flow of tourists. The trek up the mountain was well worth the 7-hour hike to see the Jade Emperor’s Temple which houses many different shrines and is a sacred place according to Daoism. Mt Tai Shan has been a place of worship for at least 3000 years. We made our way back down Mt Tai Shan, it was dark and wet, it rained a lot on the way back, but it could not take away my feeling that it had been a very successful day. One of my favourites by far!
On the third day we visited the Confucius Temple and his home, which is called the Kong Family Mansion. Here we got to see ancient Chinese culture and architecture which blew me away - the detail put into the different aspects of the building was stunning. In true tourist fashion I bargained for a statue of Confucius in the line of markets outside.
The next day we were faced with our final challenge - a TEN hour standing train journey! When we got around to booking our tickets almost all of them were sold out due to this being a very busy time of year so these were the only ones that could get us back home before Uni started again. At the start of the return journey, we spent most of our time doing a musical chair strategy where we would sit in someone’s seat if they got off at the station and hope that someone wasn’t going to get on it at that stop. Eventually we ended up at the back of the carriage and had claimed our spot on the floor for the rest of the trip. We made it back home around 3 in the morning. The whole experience was well worth it and was a good way to kick off the month.
The rest of this month has gone back to normal for me, attending classes just as usual. After the holidays, I’ve now picked up the extracurricular activity calligraphy which is surprisingly quite fun and is a nice way to be involved in the culture but in a calmer environment.
On one of our free weekends, the Scholars were invited to a Ceilidh run by the Beijing Scottish Society and three of my friends and I decided to go. I got dressed in my full formal kilt attire, yes of course I took my kilt! The weather couldn’t have been better for the event as it was raining again so it really did feel like home. I also met someone from Westhill who knows one of my sister’s Aberdeen University friends – it’s a small world! The event was fantastic, we got a few good hours of dancing and enjoyed a delicious buffet.
Although China has been a great experience so far, everything hasn’t been perfect. Just a few days ago I went through a very traumatic experience… I woke up and found that my phone 手机had stopped working. This caused a few problems for me. Not just that I lost my connection with home and lost a lot of pictures, but I wasn’t able to pay for most things or even get a bike anymore. However, my friend came to my rescue and has kindly lent me his spare phone (glad I let him borrow my kilt last month). It just showed me how important it is to be connected to a smart phone in China and without one, how difficult it can be to go about daily life here.
Next week is the start of mid term exams. Better get back to studying!